The effect of power allocation on Visible Light Communication using commercial phosphor-converted LED lamp for indirect illumination

Visible light communication (VLC) systems should be designed to provide illumination and wireless data services simultaneously. To achieve this goal at a reasonable cost, the use of Phosphor-Converted (PC) LEDs for indirect illumination should be favored to provide a homogeneous and reliable coverage in the whole service area. Unfortunately, PC-LEDs found in the market so far have not been designed for data transmission; moreover, the response of the other (electro-) optical components of the VLC link are far from ideal. In this paper, we estimate the data rate that is feasible with VLC when indirect illumination is used. For this purpose, the end-to-end response of the VLC link is first modeled using actual measurements of the spectral power distribution of a PC-LED lamp and the ceiling reflectance. Then, different power allocation schemes are studied assuming an optical OFDM waveform. As commercial LEDs have a relatively slow time response, the equivalent VLC channel that results has strong frequency selectivity; therefore, notable data rate gains are achievable when waterfilling power allocation is applied.